Scientists Engineered Tobacco Plants to Produce Five Mind-Altering Psychedelic Compounds

The substances have been used by Indigenous peoples for thousands of years, but they’ve recently become popular as possible therapeutics for mental health conditions

Sara Hashemi | Daily Correspondent

April 7, 2026

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Nature can be pretty trippy, with mind-altering psychedelics coming from all sorts of wild sources. Certain mushrooms produce psilocybin, some plants contain DMT and a toad species secretes bufotenin and 5-methoxy-DMT.

Now, scientists have engineered tobacco plants to temporarily produce five psychoactive compounds that are normally made by other plants, fungi and animals. The breakthrough, described April 1 in the journal Science Advances, could lead to more sustainable and efficient manufacturing and harvesting of psychedelics. That would make it easier for scientists to study their therapeutic uses, since past research has suggested that psychedelics can help treat certain mental health conditions.

“This is exciting work,” Andrew Jones, a bioengineer at Miami University who was not involved in the study, tells Erik Stokstad at Science. While he suspects that microbes, rather than tobacco, will be the best route for large-scale production of psychedelics, he says the findings could inform the manufacture of psychoactive medications for severe depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress.

Indigenous peoples have used psychedelics for medicinal, religious and other purposes for thousands of years. For instance, the DMT-containing brew ayahuasca, made with plants, has long been part of traditional Amazonian rituals. And many Indigenous groups in Mesoamerica have relied on “magic mushrooms” with psilocybin to aid in spiritual guidance.

More recently, scientists have grown interested in studying these compounds for therapeutic uses in Western medicine. But harvesting plants, fungi and animals that naturally produce psychoactive compounds raises ecological and ethical concerns, and many of these species are threatened by habitat loss and overexploitation. Some psychedelics can be made in the lab, but synthesizing them requires several steps and specific materials, and the process can create unwanted byproducts.

To develop a better method, the researchers behind the new study turned to tweaking tobacco plants. First, they figured out the pathway by which plants make DMT from a building block of proteins, the amino acid tryptophan. Then, they examined three DMT-containing plants—two coffee relatives used in ayahuasca and an Australian tree—for RNA that gets translated into proteins needed to produce the psychedelic. Two top candidate genes, PvTDC1 and PvTDC2, emerged, which the team added to tryptophan-rich tobacco plants, turning them into DMT factories.

That inspired the researchers to alter tobacco plants to make four other tryptophan-based compounds: the potent DMT relative 5-methoxy-DMT, bufotenine and psilocybin and its active, metabolized form, psilocin. They even created some tobacco plants that synthesized all five psychedelics at once, although they produced smaller concentrations of each compound compared to plants engineered to specialize in just one psychedelic.

For now, however, the effect is only temporary, since the new genes are introduced via bacteria rather than changing the plants’ genetic instruction books. Permanently altering the plants could be problematic, since the psychedelics are often used as recreational drugs, says Asaph Aharoni, a study co-author and plant biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, to Matthew Sparkes at New Scientist. “It’s a little bit tricky if we have it inherited, and then people will ask for seeds.”

Rupert Fray, a plant geneticist at the University of Nottingham in England who was not involved in the work, tells the outlet that around 25 percent of prescription drugs are at least partially derived from plants, and opportunities exist to develop “green factories” that can grow desired compounds in greenhouses. “If you want to understand something, you’ve got to be able to build something, so showing that you can make it in tobacco plants is useful,” he says.

The study’s main purpose was to determine whether it’s feasible to make DMT and other compounds by tweaking plants, Aharoni tells Science. But “the industry can decide what’s more commercially viable.”

Sara Hashemi | Read More

Sara Hashemi is a science writer and fact-checker currently based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Sierra, The Body, Maisonneuve magazine and more.